FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 15, 2025
MEDIA CONTACT
Alexis Posel, [email protected]
Washington, D.C., April 15, 2025 – A whistleblower has exposed DOGE’s unlawful plundering of systems at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), possibly affecting millions of Americans – and the nefarious underbelly of DOGE. It brings the Trump Administration’s lawless attack on democracy to staggering new lows.
Dan Berulis, a civil servant at the NLRB and a Whistleblower Aid client, sounded the alarm on DOGE having harvested nearly the entirety of their critical information systems, which could include lists of union activists, ongoing labor cases, sensitive corporate information, and personally identifiable information. DOGE’s activity with the NLRB’s information technology infrastructure has exposed the data in those systems for exploitation by foreign adversaries, posing a grave risk to national security.
“What is particularly alarming is that in addition to private data being exfiltrated out of NLRB systems – and within minutes of DOGE personnel creating service/user accounts in NLRB systems – someone or something within Russia appeared to attempt to login using all of the correct credentials (eg. Usernames/Passwords) on several occasions. This near real-time unlimited access by Russian actors heightens concerns to a level not previously seen and could have destroyed the agency’s entire infrastructure in a matter of minutes,” said Whistleblower Aid Chief Legal Counsel Andrew Bakaj.
Bakaj continued, “Leading up to Berulis’s lawful whistleblowing, he has faced the physical intimidation tactics employed by the same autocracies for which DOGE has proffered Americans data to. The message is clear: be complacent or be terrorized.”
“The amount of data that was taken is the equivalent to a section of the New York Public Library, and the amount of people it could impact is in the hundreds of millions,” Dan Berulis said. “Our information systems appear to have been assaulted and someone with the capacity and mandate to investigate needs to do so.”
The direct and in-person threats against Berulis makes it all the more critical that DOGE and the Trump Administration be investigated for their violation of the public’s best interest and held accountable.
“If the compromise of American’s data wasn’t concerning enough, the targeted, physical threats and surveillance of my client takes this to another level,” Bakaj said. “It is time for Congress to act and investigate to keep our democracy from slipping away, something that could take generations to repair.”
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Whistleblower Aid provides pro bono legal, advocacy, and communications support to government and private sector whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The organization’s lawyers have represented some of the most consequential national security and Big Tech whistleblowers in history, including the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the anonymous intelligence community whistleblower whose disclosures led to the first impeachment of President Trump, and others.
Whistleblower Aid is a 501(c)(3) organization.
